Creative writing programmes are not very necessary. They just exist so that people like us can make a living.

I’m very feminist in the way I look at the world, and that worldview must somehow be part of my work.

That her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out

Because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye … I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature.

I would come, many years later, to understand why To Kill A Mockingbird is considered an important novel, but when I first read it at 11, I was simply absorbed by the way it evoked the mysteries of childhood, of treasures discovered in trees, and games played with an exotic summer friend.

I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is obvious to everyone else.

Show a people as one thing, only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.